Fine-Grained Interpretation of Political Opinions in Large Language Models

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Hu, Jingyu, Yang, Mengyue, Du, Mengnan, Liu, Weiru
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2025
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author Hu, Jingyu
Yang, Mengyue
Du, Mengnan
Liu, Weiru
author_facet Hu, Jingyu
Yang, Mengyue
Du, Mengnan
Liu, Weiru
contents Studies of LLMs' political opinions mainly rely on evaluations of their open-ended responses. Recent work indicates that there is a misalignment between LLMs' responses and their internal intentions. This motivates us to probe LLMs' internal mechanisms and help uncover their internal political states. Additionally, we found that the analysis of LLMs' political opinions often relies on single-axis concepts, which can lead to concept confounds. In this work, we extend the single-axis to multi-dimensions and apply interpretable representation engineering techniques for more transparent LLM political concept learning. Specifically, we designed a four-dimensional political learning framework and constructed a corresponding dataset for fine-grained political concept vector learning. These vectors can be used to detect and intervene in LLM internals. Experiments are conducted on eight open-source LLMs with three representation engineering techniques. Results show these vectors can disentangle political concept confounds. Detection tasks validate the semantic meaning of the vectors and show good generalization and robustness in OOD settings. Intervention Experiments show these vectors can intervene in LLMs to generate responses with different political leanings.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2506_04774
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Fine-Grained Interpretation of Political Opinions in Large Language Models
Hu, Jingyu
Yang, Mengyue
Du, Mengnan
Liu, Weiru
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
Studies of LLMs' political opinions mainly rely on evaluations of their open-ended responses. Recent work indicates that there is a misalignment between LLMs' responses and their internal intentions. This motivates us to probe LLMs' internal mechanisms and help uncover their internal political states. Additionally, we found that the analysis of LLMs' political opinions often relies on single-axis concepts, which can lead to concept confounds. In this work, we extend the single-axis to multi-dimensions and apply interpretable representation engineering techniques for more transparent LLM political concept learning. Specifically, we designed a four-dimensional political learning framework and constructed a corresponding dataset for fine-grained political concept vector learning. These vectors can be used to detect and intervene in LLM internals. Experiments are conducted on eight open-source LLMs with three representation engineering techniques. Results show these vectors can disentangle political concept confounds. Detection tasks validate the semantic meaning of the vectors and show good generalization and robustness in OOD settings. Intervention Experiments show these vectors can intervene in LLMs to generate responses with different political leanings.
title Fine-Grained Interpretation of Political Opinions in Large Language Models
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.04774